about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality.
But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people
have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light;
some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness,
because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a
lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash
municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something.
And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes.
So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day,
there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all,
and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light.
Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must
discuss in the dark.



II. On the negative spirit


Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity,
of the hysteria which as often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns.
But let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense,
necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality.
It is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea
of success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal,
in what Stevenson called, with his usual startling felicity,
"the lost fight of virtue." A modern morality, on the other hand,
can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow
breaches of law; its only certainty is a certainty of ill.
It can only point to imperfection. It has no perfection to point to.